Re: [Visionaries] I have a dream... a couple of them, actually...

[Norbert Bollow]

> > There's a project for this already, called SharpDevelop

David Sugar <address@hidden> wrote:

> I would not discourage development of an IDE as such.  The real
> question is if there is something that would result which offers
> something substancially different than SharpDevelop, and that
> SharpDevelop is not architected suitably to either do now or can
> easily be made to do.

Yes, these are good points... in the context of DotGNU however I'm
very reluctant to encourage starting projects that compete with any
existing Free Software projects.  There are two main resons for this:

1.  There's so much work that needs to be done which doesn't compete
    with existing projects.  While it's nice to have multiple options
    to do a task with Free Software, I think it's important to set
    priorities on projects which provide functionality that isn't
    readily availbale in Free Software yet.  For this reason, the
    R# vision is clearly more interesting than the prospect of yet
    another IDE project.  (Building an IDE is a *lot* of work.  If
    there are too many such projects, most of them will not succeed
    in attracting enough contributors.)

2.  As a major goal of DotGNU is to facilitate system integration,
    it's important for us to maintain good, cooperative relationships
    with the maintainers of many other Free Software packages.  For
    this reason I will generally not support the creation of new
    DotGNU development projects that exist primarily to compete with
    an existing Free Software project (which is not part of DotGNU).

    If you want to create a new Free Software project that seeks to
    compete with an existing Free Software project, there's nothing
    intrinsically wrong with that, but DotGNU is primarily interested
    in cooperating with other Free Software projects and not in
    competing with them.

Greetings, Norbert.

-- 
Founder & Steering Committee member of http://gnu.org/projects/dotgnu/
Free Software Business Strategy Guide   --->  http://FreeStrategy.info
Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet (near Zurich, Switzerland)
Tel +41 1 972 20 59        Fax +41 1 972 20 69       http://norbert.ch